Are Georgia's voting machines safe? Maybe not.

Scoop Breaking News: Voting system integrity flaw.

Blackbox Voting: Ballot tampering in the 21st century.

Notable Software: Electronic Voting.

Talion: Vote counting machines.

Common Dreams: If you want to win an election, just control the voting machines.

See the Forest: Top blog on voting irregularities.

Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplies 100% of Georgia's electronic voting machines, has security flaws worse than Microsoft. From Scoop:

Feb 5, 2003: Yesterday, technicians and programmers for Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied every single voting machine for the surprising 2002 results in the state of Georgia, the company that is preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper-trail computerized voting, admitted to a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw.

Diebold parks thousand of files on the internet on an unprotected domain. These files include elections files, specifications, and even voting program patches. Anybody could access and tamper with election files, altering results. Voting program patches could be modified to incorrectly record votes. Specifications for hardware and software could be downloaded, giving hackers a blueprint to the architecture, and basically a key to the back door.

It couldn't really be that easy to locate the files and actually tamper with anything that could affect election results, could it? From Scoop:

Though the address is obscure, whistleblowers found the FTP site using a simple Google search......

These files, freely shared and sometimes snagged from the FTP and e-mailed to election workers and technicians, included hardware and software specifications, election results files, the vote-counting program itself, and "replacement files" for Diebold's GEMS vote-counting system and for the Windows software underlying the system. In fact, anyone with a modem could have hunkered over a computer to download, upload or slightly change and overwrite the files on Diebold's FTP site.

Blackbox Voting gives you the Top Ten Way to Rig a Voting Machine.

Wow! And these are the same machines that counted and tallied every single vote cast in Georgia's 2002 election, which had some very surprising results that certainly were different from almost every single poll taken in the days leading up to the election. Well at least we know that Georgia and other states would never buy voting machines from a company that may have any conflict of interest. Well maybe we know? From Blackbox Voting:

It used to be that we knew who our elected officials were and the names of local election officials were a matter of public record. Manufacturers, who now count our votes, are not required to reveal the names of owners or key people. The codes counting our votes are considered "proprietary" and outside officials are not allowed to examine them.

Some voting machine manufacturers are salted with vested interests. Among the owners of voting machine companies and testing labs: active politicians, corporate lobbyists, former CIA directors, and people who have been involved in prosecutions for bribery, kickbacks, and fraud. Our "watchdog" groups are also influenced by special interests. Voting machine companies are using lobbying and political influence to influence purchase of machines, specifications and regulations.

Well it is certainly good to know that if we suspect any irregularity, we can go back and do a manual recount. Well, actually you can't. If the machines in Georgia are tampered with, those tampered votes are permanent. We have no method of recounting and verifying. Georgia has eliminated any paper trail of votes. From Talion:

Because current vote-counting systems are not sufficiently protected from manipulation, and are getting less and less auditable, it is now very important to know who has access to the machines. There is no place for secrecy in our voting-counting system. Secret voting, yes. Secret vote-COUNTING, no - in fact, it's unconstitutional.

For some inexplicable reason, the U.S. is rushing to eliminate the only physical record of the mark made by each voter, going to straight touch-screens with no paper trail. Canada doesn't allow this. Neither does Japan. Why are we so casually throwing away the only real audit trail that protects our vote?

With touch-tone screens, we simply have no paper trail for millions of votes, with private, secret, and (according to computer security experts), insecure programming for vote-counting machines that invites tampering. It takes only ONE true believer with access to manipulate the counting code.

So, do we even know if the votes are being counted correctly in the first place? Surely these things are checked? From: Notable Software:

The vendors and certifying authorities have taken a "trust us" stance, claiming that the machines are "fail-safe" and that the internal record and tally constitutes an accurate reflection of the ballots cast on the machine. In fact, machines have failed in actual use -- choices have been displayed that were not selected by the voters, and votes have been mis-recorded (in some cases losing them entirely, or shifting them to other ballot positions). Some of the machines enter a lock-down mode when the polls are closed, rendering it impossible to later check that votes could have been cast properly for each candidate or issue.

Vendors have tied the hands of election officials and independent examiners by protecting their systems under restrictive trade-secret agreements, making it a felony to inspect the operation of the machines without a comprehensive court order.

From Scoop:

....Diebold Accuvote machines appear to have "back door" mechanisms which may allow reprogramming after votes have been cast. Diebold’s Accuvote machines were developed by a company founded by Bob Urosevich, a CEO of Diebold Election Systems and Global Election Systems, which Diebold acquired. Together with his brother Todd, he also founded ES&S, where Todd Urosevich still works. ES&S and Sequoia use identical software and hardware in their optical scan machines. All three companies’ machines have miscounted recent elections, sometimes electing the wrong candidates in races that were not particularly close.

So what do we know now. Georgia has rushed out and replaced every voting machine in Georgia with machines that cannot be recounted, nor the process audited or verified. The company that sold us these machines has security flaws you could drive a truck through, stores vital information on a public accessible website, and has a history of miscounting elections. The people who manufacture these machines are not required to reveal anybody who may have a conflict of interest in vote counting.

Does this sound like conspiracy theories to you. Well maybe not. From Common Dreams:

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of Blackbox Voting, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

Maybe the surprising voting results in the Georgia Senate race that elected the draft avoider Saxby Chambliss over war hero Max Cleland was counted accurately, as were the votes in the Barnes Perdue shocker. Maybe they were not.

One thing for sure, is that with Georgia's voting machines, we have no way of finding out.